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W ith the exception of poetry, into which she made two brief forays, ‘ W oolf was remarkably comprehensive in her use of genre. This comprehensiveness raises the question o f how W oolf matched content with genre, and what criteria influenced her choices. In two ways, her use of genre can be seen as a choice between public and private. The most obvious generic public/private dichotomy is determined by publication. Private genres include diaries and letters, while public genres are those intended for publication. This division is most clear at the start of W o o lfs career in

1904, when her diaries are intensely private, but her essays and reviews carry a voice of surprising confidence and authority for a twenty-four year old beginning her career as a writer. W oolf finds comfort in the anonymous, public voice of these early essays which allows her to overcome the fear of exposure which often accompanied

publication.

The question of genre becomes more complex and fruitful, however, if we consider W o o lfs own method of dividing genre, namely along lines of fact and fiction, or fact and vision as she often called them. Although crossovers occur, W oolf saw her projects as either based on fact or on fiction, and this distinction can also be seen as a public/private division. For Woolf, non-fictional, or predominantly fact- based, genres such as the essay, review or biography were public, and fictional genres such as novels, and short stories were private. In her eyes, factual genres employed real, public events, or issues as a foundation or point of origin, whereas fiction was

' ‘Fantasy upon a gentleman who converted his impressions of a private house into cash’, a poem on the invasion of privacy by the public media (Bell, Vol. II, pp.253-254) and ‘Ode Written Partly in Prose on Seeing the Name of Cutbush Above a Butcher’s Shop in Pentonville’ (SF, p.237).

internal rather than external in origin, coming from her own private consciousness. Dividing genres as public and private in this way moves beyond the obvious

distinction of published and non-published, and since it is a distinction which W oolf herself used, offers insight into how she distinguished fact from fiction, how she chose between nonfictional and fictional genres and how she moved between the two.

This problem of movement or oscillation between fact and fiction, public and private, was a constant preoccupation for Woolf. As late as 1940, W oolf found the shift from ‘public’ to ‘private’ writing awkward (D V, p.261). Although she often made too clean a division - Three Guineas, although predominantly factual contains fictional elements - the sense of upheaval in moving between ‘the 2 worlds’

represented by Three Guineas and The Years speaks of the depth of W oolf’s distinction (D IV, p.350). Moving also between the fact of Three Guineas and the fiction of ‘Poyntz Hall’ created ‘violent oscillations’ (D V, p. 155). Factual writing was grounded, as in the ‘solid world of Roger’, compared to the ‘airy world of Poyntz H air (D V, p. 141), just as behind the ‘solid possession’ which was ‘The Pargiters’, based on hours of research, loomed the ‘shape of pure poetry’ (D IV, p. 145). The fact/fiction split was an essential one for W oolf and one which divided her work in terms of genre. The move between public and private genres was sometimes

refreshing, a source of new energy, as when she found herself ‘infinitely delighting in facts for a change’ and sometimes disruptive (D IV, p. 129).

For Woolf, the division between fact and fiction came to the fore in the 1930s when she became more adamant in her feminism and relied on fact more heavily to convey her arguments. How did she incorporate fact and politics into her work? What genres did she use for the purpose? These questions came to a head with the

private genres, of fact and fiction. The essays were to explore factually and historically what the chapters depicted fictionally. This is the only time that W oolf attempted to mix public and private genres in this way. The evolution of the essay-novel ‘The Pargiters’ into the novel The Years reveals much about how W oolf viewed the use of genre, how she divided and combined both her feminism and her fiction, mixing real public events and issues with her own private fictions. The writing of The Years also demonstrates the increase in the crossover between fact and fiction in the 1930s due to the urgency of her feminism, the extensive research W oolf did on the situation of women, which she wanted to use in her private as well as her public genres.

(1) The Entry Into Publication

W oolf’s most private and most consistently used genre, the diary, escapes any rigid characterization. The diary is the text which exemplifies most clearly the

contingency of W oolf’s response to the various events of her life. The mood, tone, style, function and subject matter constantly shift, as does W oolf’s own response to the diary itself. The diary was a space for private emotion for Woolf, a place for recording private and public events, but it was also a literary text, a place where she could practice her writing and a text which she could reread with a critical eye. This self- consciousness is part of the tension in the diary between public and private personae; ‘the anxieties the journal discloses about her public persona.’ ^ In its privacy, W oolf can use the diary to express, for example, her fear of publication and reviews, but also its privacy emphasizes the potential presence of a public, a reader, even if it is only

^ Judy Simons, Diaries and Journals of Literary Women from Fannv Burnev to Virginia W oolf (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 184.

W oolf herself. Nancy W alker writes of the diaries of three women writers, one of whom is Woolf, that ‘each addresses the page/reader from behind a series of identities or "masks"; and each makes clear that her "private" writing is addressed to some

"public" with which she has an uneasy relationship.’ ^ Although W oolf’s early journal entries are for the most part either writing exercises or factual recounting of daily events, the amount of material from 1897, for example, when W oolf was fourteen and fifteen, is evidence of the importance the diary held for her. It is in these early years that W oolf’s published and non-published work marks the clearest dichotomy between public and private.

One distancing technique which is evidence of W oolf’s difficultly with self- expression is the use of the persona of Miss Jan, who appears periodically in the 1897 journal. Miss Jan appears when W oolf wants to dissociate herself from either

embarrassment or excessive emotion. On February 19th 1897, having felt

uncomfortable while paying a visit, W oolf writes, ‘Poor Miss Jan utterly lost her wits dropped her umbrella, answered at random talked nonsense, and grew red as a turkey cock.’ ^ W oolf can examine herself without having to take the full burden of what she sees. The division of self is made clear by the use of I’ and ‘Miss Jan’ in one

sentence: ‘So we left, I with the conviction that what ever talents Miss Jan may have’ (PA, p.39). On 2 May W oolf uses Miss Jan again to distance herself from unpleasant truths after hearing one of her father’s lectures. She writes, ‘The lecture was very deep

^ Nancy Walker, ‘"Wider Than the Sky": Public Presence and Private Self in Dickinson, James, and W oolf’, The Private Self: Theory and Practice of W om en’s Autobiographical Writings, ed. Shari Benstock (London: Routledge, 1988), p.274.

See Louise De Salvo, ‘As "Miss Jan Says": Virginia W oolf’s Early Journals’, Virginia W oolf and Bloomsburv: A Centenary Celebration, ed. Jane Marcus (London: Macmillan, 1987).

^ Virginia Woolf, A Passionate Apprentice: The Earlv Journals 1897-1909, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys Ltd., 1990), p.39.

rather too deep for the audience; very logical & difficult for the ignorant (i.e. Miss Jan) to follow ’ (PA, p.79). She is separate both from ‘the audience’ and also from herself through the persona. Not only the use of Miss Jan, but also the avoidance of emotional reactions suggests that W oolf felt restricted in her diary writing. She no doubt felt that what she was writing was intensely private, hence the comment in cramped holiday accommodation that ‘This diary is written under difficulties’ (PA, p.32), but that there was much which was too private for the diary. Later in life W oolf foresaw the publication of at least sections of her diaries but in her early journals she relied on the security of privacy and was inhibited by fear of publicity (D III, p.67 and D V, p.54).

Louise De Salvo maintains that W oolf glued her 1899 summer journal, written while on holiday at Warboys, into the pages of Dr. Issac W att’s Logick: or, the right use of Reason to ensure privacy. ^ The journal suggests other reasons, however, namely that she wanted to replace the paper cover of her notebook with the ‘ancient tooled calf’ of Dr W att’s book (PA, p. 159). Rather than privacy, it seems W oolf wanted the authority, the ‘air of distinction’ (PA, p. 160). She wished to recast her work in the pages of a ‘worthy & ancient work’ (PA, p. 159) instantly giving her own work importance and dignity. The renaming is not to hide her work, but to increase its importance, to clothe it in the robes of a ‘resplendent’ binding (PA, p. 159). W oolf wrote that she did not mind defacing W atts’s writing and in that she glues her pages in upside down on W atts’s there is a complete inversion of his dry advocacy of reason and logic by her private diary entries.

In stark contrast to the voice of W oolf’s early journals is the voice of her early essays, the first one written in 1904, at age twenty-two, for the Guardian, a weekly

Christian newspaper, at the suggestion of Violet Dickinson. The public nature of her nonfiction is reinforced here, since it was literally with these essays that W oolf became public, and in opposition to the diaries she developed a strong, authoritative voice for the purpose. W oolf wrote two pieces in 1904, the year of her father’s death, one a review and one an essay, both published in December. Both pieces were tentative in parts, but by 1905 she had settled into a public voice. Her first publication was a review of W. D. Howells’s The Son of Roval Langbrith, which consists of little more than a rather pedantic plot summary (E I, pp.3-5). Awkward phrases such as ‘his child knows him only through the words of the widow, which, for a good reason, are few ’ and tentative observations such as ‘the weak point of the book seems to us to lie’ separate this review from her work in the following year (E I, pp. 3&4). The second piece from 1904 is an account of her visit to Haworth, and a deliberation on the value of visits to the dwelling places of famous people. This essay opens with: ‘I do not know whether pilgrimages to the shrines of famous men ought not to be condemned as sentimental journeys’ (E I, p.5). The opening phrase, ‘I do not know’ immediately suggests uncertainty and then the sentence as a whole undercuts the premise of the essay. In addition, the double negative adds to the circuitous awkwardness of the first section of the essay, as W oolf shies away from opinion. ‘How far surroundings radically affect people’s minds it is not for me to ask’ (E I, p.5) is a denial of

authority, but then W oolf goes ahead anyway and asks whether Charlotte Bronte would have written differently had she lived in Whitechapel. Avoiding answering the

question, she backs away from the issue with ‘However, I am taking away my only excuse for visiting Haworth’ (E I, p.6). The opening is a confused avoidance of assertion; the voice only relaxes when the factual description of the places begins.

in Fiction, published not much later, on January 25 1905, W o o lfs voice has become more authoritative. The piece is underscored by sarcasm and ironic distance, a sign of her confidence in her criticism of Courtney’s attempt to define feminine fiction. ‘We would have spared him the trouble willingly in exchange for some definite verdict; we can all read Mrs Humphrey W ard’ (E I, p. 15) is a biting attack on Courtney’s certainty that ‘there is such a thing as the feminine note in fiction’ (B I, p. 15). In using the pronoun ‘w e’, W oolf gives the essay weight, creating an opposition between Courtney and women. Her sarcasm as she exposes and then counters two of Courtney’s claims about women’s writing again speaks for her confidence in both her argument and her ability to express it: ‘Women, we gather, are seldom artists, because they have a passion for detail which conflicts with the proper artistic proportion of their work’ and

‘Women, again, excel in "close analytic miniature work;" they are more happy when they reproduce than when they create’ (E I, p. 16). With the ‘we gather’ and the use of quotation marks, W oolf subtly displays her disagreement and distances herself from Courtney’s unfounded generalizations. It seems that W oolf discovers the confident, public voice of her essays in reaction to a display of assertive masculinity. Anger and annoyance at Courtney, rather than admiration of Bronte led her to tighten her style and sharpen her tone.

A last example is W oolf’s review, published in February 1905, of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl. The first and last sentences of this piece are the best examples of the clarity and assertiveness of tone which characterize W oolf’s essay writing. ‘Mr Henry James is one of the very few living writers who are sufficiently great to possess a point of view’ and ‘There is no living novelist whose standard is higher, or whose achievement is so consistently great’ frame an essay which carries a tone of age and experience, typical of W oolf’s essays in general but surprising in this.

only the third month of her career as a published writer (E I, pp.22 & 24). W oolf’s confidence with her subject matter as well as her tone is made clearer through comparison with other contemporary reviews. She writes observantly and directly about Jam es’s style, whereas other reviewers stick to summaries of theme and plot. W oolf describes the obscuration of James’ excessive use of detail and his

‘overburdened sentences’ (E I, p.23). She gives examples of sentences which ‘suffer from a surfeit of words’, stating that genius ‘would have dissolved them, and whole chapters of the same kind, into a single w ord’ (E I, p.23). An anonymous review in the Nation, published the month before W oolf’s, is noncommittal in its brief analysis of Jam es’s style, attributing its obscurity to ‘saying too much and saying too little, even from sentences too complex and too elliptical, too long and too short’, before moving quickly on to plot summary. ^ Another anonymous review in the Graphic merely laments the complexity of style without attempting to analyze it. ® The writer resorts to the cliché of ‘not being able to see the forest for the trees’ and decides that James is

‘an acquired taste’, obviously one not acquired by the reviewer. ^ In contrast, W oolf is direct and assertive in her judgement, avoiding the tone of defeat found in so many contemporary reviews of the novel.

W oolf develops extremely quickly a public voice for the public genre of the essay. Undoubtedly, the anonymity of the unsigned essays contributed to W oolf’s confidence. Here was a forum in which she could express her opinion outright. ‘My real delight in reviewing is to say nasty things; and hitherto I have had to [be]

respectful,’ she writes in 1904, evidence of the authority she felt the genre of the essay

^ Henry James: Critical Assessments, Vol. II, ed. Graham Clarke (Sussex: Helm Information Ltd., 1991), p.331.

^ Clarke, p.342. ^ Clarke, p.342.

afforded her, allowing her an honest response (L I, pp. 166-167). As with the Courtney essay, W oolf was liberated by nastiness, freed by the opportunity to resist.

W o o lfs letters of November 1904, primarily to Violet Dickinson, parallel the change in voice heard in the essays, moving rapidly from a tentative beginning to a fully confident tone. W oolf writes to Violet of Mrs Lyttleton, editor of the woman’s pages of the Guardian, ‘O f course I dont for a moment expect her to take this which is probably too long or too short, or in some way utterly unsuitable’ (L I, p. 154).

Quickly, however, W oolf loses respect for Margaret Lyttleton and gains confidence in her own work. ‘It was quite good before the official eye fell upon it; now it is

worthless, and doesn’t in the least represent all the toil I put into it’ (L I, p. 178), she writes of the Golden Bowl review. Her letters become scathing of Mrs Lyttleton and her newspaper: ‘Really I never read such pedantic commonplace as the Guardianese: it takes up the line of a Governess, and maiden Lady, and high church Parson mixed; how they ever got such a black little goat into their fold, I cant conceive’ (L I, p. 178). No doubt, the doctrinaire narrowness of the Guardian made her rapidly aware of her own abilities, and yet again she was stimulated by disagreement.

The public genre of the essay allowed W oolf the context in which to cultivate an assertive public voice. This confidence did not appear in her early diaries, nor did it surround the publication of her first novel. The Vovage Out, in 1915. With fiction, a private genre as she conceived it, she was exposing more of herself, more was at stake than with a short newspaper review. Generic distinctions, then, are important in terms of W oolf’s psychology of writing, in that the choice of genre affected W oolf’s

(2) Generic Crossovers